What does it mean to have giants like Google, Apple and Amazon investing in robotics? Since last December, Google alone has acquired a handful of companies in robotics, home automation and artificial intelligence. This can be pretty exciting for robotics. But what exactly is the internet giant planning to do with this technology? Is there something we should be worried about? If there is, what can we do about it?

This article considers privacy in robotic systems (such as personal service robotics) as being of greater importance than privacy in telecommunications (such as Internet). We will return to our regularly scheduled program – about gestures and body language – next month.

Let’s say a white box showed up on your doorstep and you open it up and find a little humanoid robot made by Google. A GoogleBot! The brightly-colored pamphlet says that the little disk of a device will vacuum your floor, all for the same cost as your Gmail account: free.

Ryan Calo discusses how researchers at Oxford, Geneva, and Berkeley have created a proof of concept for using commercially available brain-computer interfaces to discover private facts about today’s gamers.

This article looks at the arrival of systems such as Siri, Google Now, and Watson and claims that these systems are the search engines of the next decade because they mine intimate data. Since they integrate search they will replace search, as well as a host of other interface and information retrieval functions. This offers an outline to both the personal benefits and privacy risks.